Remembering Thelma

Charles Chinaski is a guy with many problems and feels responsible for most of them: women, alcohol, his hostility towards certain groups of people. One day, he decides to consult the first doctor he comes across.

Ella is captivated by Jodie, a writer of erotic fiction. Sent to her majestic country house to photograph her for a magazine, Ella discovers there is more to Jodie than meets the eye. Siren is an erotic lesbian drama made by women for women. Featuring a main cast of six beautiful women, Siren features exquisite visual imagery combined with a stunning soundtrack. Siren is the ultimate in lesbian erotica.

Two young Argentines, brought together by chance, wander the streets of New York City, increasingly lost in a maze of currency exchange, translation problems, religious vocation and nocturnal flirtation.

Patrick Haggerty grew up the son of a dairy farmer in rural Dry Creek, Washington, during the 1950s. As a teenager, Pat began to understand he was gay—something he thought he was hiding well. But one day, after performing at a school assembly, Pat learned that his father could see him much more clearly than he realized.

Ich Chef du nix

Main character Esther feels like she doesn't fit into the 'elite' and takes the big showdown with those who always have.

In a remote fishing island in the '50s, Pepito grows up learning the trade of his mother, Rosa, the only midwife capable of delivering the newborn babies of their community. At first, the young son doesn't mind the unusual arrangement, but as he grows older, he begins to resist the role traditionally meant only for women. In time, Pepito's coming of age intersects with the lives of the other islanders, whose beliefs and struggles become critical impetus to his maturity.

This haunting film comprises of footage shot during WWI from opposite sides of the conflict: Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. The filmmakers tinted the material with sensual colors from sepia to red, blue, and purple and slowed the footage to analyze the material. The total absence of commentary renders the material eloquent and disturbing. - MoMA

In 1926 the remains of two ships built by the Emperor Caligula were found at the bottom of Lake Nemi, near Rome. Mussolini had the lake drained and established a museum as a celebration of the imperial origins of Fascism, but the museum and ships were destroyed by fleeing Nazis in 1944. The film commemorates these events. - MoMA

Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, goes through her paces, bares her body, and then, astonishingly and literally, transcends it. While the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism.

Legendary rumba musician Alberto Zayas serves as a guide for this vibrant journey through Cuban musical history and culture. The short features interviews, footage of impromptu street performances, and studio recordings.

This black-and-white film is a loving portrait of Santiago de Cuba and its people. It provides a view of Cuba as a picturesque country, the product of an earthy mix of black and criollo cultures. The film uses historical images which portray the end of the eighteenth century when Haitian slave owners fled with their slaves to Cuba after the Haitian Revolution.

Scénarios sur la drogue

A 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers' exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.

Mary and Joseph make the hard journey to Bethlehem for a blessed event in this retelling of the Nativity story. This meticulously researched and visually lush adaptation of the biblical tale follows the pair on their arduous path to their arrival in a small village, where they find shelter in a quiet manger and Jesus is born.

Fantasy drama Rachel's Dream was set sometime in the future when the world is besieged by technology, young Rachel discovers that through a large bank of video screens in her sister's apartment, her wishes can come true when she brings to life the image on an anti-pollution poster. This new friend helps her to make up her mind about her own future.

Treating the problem of anorexia nervosa from the parents' perspective, Rosler presents a mother and father speaking about the tragedy of their daughter's death as a result of dieting. The conversation turns toward the irony of self-starvation in a land of plenty and toward the international politics of food, where food aid is used as a negotiating tool. Confronting a serious issue, Rosler simultaneously sets into play the confessional form and the ghoulish staginess of talk show dramatics.

In an inquiry into the relation between the corporation, the state and the family, Domination and the Everyday presents a fractured barrage of simultaneous sound tracks, film stills and a crawling text. Questioning the privatized existence of a woman and child, and the role of media information in daily life, this non-narrative tape is structured around the sounds of a woman feeding her small son and readying him for bed, while a radio interview with an art dealer plays in the background. Photographs of family life and corporate ads are juxtaposed with a written text that crawls across the screen, comparing life in Chile with life in the United States. Rosler refers to this layered juxtaposition of fragmented sound, images and text as an "artist-mother's This Is Your Life."

Secrets From the Street examines the intersection of cultures and classes as exemplified by the street life of San Francisco's Mission District. This videotape, produced for an exhibition held jointly at San Francisco's City Hall and its Museum of Modern Art, argues — against the show's theme and title, Public Disclosure: Secrets from the Street — that accounts of cultural life that omit the question of social power are mythical: The real "secret" is the obscured relation of economic and political domination exercised by one's own culture over the observed subculture. Or, as Rosler states in the tape's voiceover, "The secret is that to know the meaning of a culture you must know the limits of meaning of your own."

In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.